"oh boy I got the new dlc I can't wait to see what new content there is" *plays another imperium of man campaign*

My problem is that if I buy it, it encourages Paradox to start pricing all new Story Packs at this price point. And then, what next? $30-40 Expansions?

The caveat with the price is that future DLCs will be at the price same level as Astral Planes. Pretty much every new game is priced higher than before 1-2 years and it was just a matter of time that this price hike will effect DLCs too.

Weirdly the rift system reminds me most of the way they handle primitives and observation now. I kind of wish we could assign a Scientist to oversee observation if we wanted and it would offer us more options.

Should see if the fleet you can summon can be turned into a merc enclave. Edit: so I checked it out, they can not have leaders so you can't make the enclave. They are super strong tho. I'm playing with the guardianship civic and when in my territory they are reaching 31k around year 80. Not sure if they are going to scale more other then my own bonuses. I can see why they couldn't have leaders tho, as a psionic clone leader would make the fleet extremely scary.

To late, had it preordered. *THE COLLECTION MUST BE COMPLETE*

Montu: "Should you buy Astral planes?" Me: You are one purchase too late.

That opening bit couldn't have described my reaction any more perfectly. I see Stellaris DLC; I buy Stellaris DLC. I do this with no other game. Still loved the video, and thanks for all you do, Montu!

The opening joke was great. Well done.

Considering I am not working at the moment and that because of that, I haven't got yet First Contact and Paragon, I will not get this new one right now. Maybe as you said in a sale it could be good. In canadian dollars, even with the 10% reduction, it still cost 22.49 instead of 24.99. For the other two, they are at 18.99 on their regular price. When I see that Baldur's Gate 3 costed me much less than all these DLCs in total and that I played 475 hours for 4 campaigns without late-game lag, I'll admit that I might become a bit picky with games that "features" a lot of expansions. I love Stellaris, I still do. And I played nearly 1400 hours. Still, BG3 and Cyberpunk 2.0 + Phantom Liberty have changed my perspective on a few things...

From how you described it, the rift system seems to have more in common with the espionage operations rather than the archeology sites.

So long as it’s actually good at what it’s trying to do - which it seems like you think it is - then that’s good enough for me. If people specifically want more narrative content and how much they’re willing to pay is going to vary a lot from person to person.

7:45 Thats Paradox for you, modifiers untop of modifiers without anything tangible.

PSA: tech bonuses are a bit bugged atm. As standard, I built a bunch of hydroponics on all my starbases for obvious reasions. If you hover over them in the starbase menu, they apply proper bonuses such as from eco stimulation and the sort. However, if you check the resource overview at the top of the screen, the tech bonuses are not being applied and each hydroponics is only producing the base 10 food

Great, as a console player I wasn’t expecting this DLC to show up until 2030 as least.

I wouldn't compare rift world to toxic god it's more similar to on the shoulders of giants staying intentionally vague here: you start with a rift in your home system and when you're finished with that (which can easily be done in the first few decades) you get hints that there will be more story later, just like how on the shoulders of giants is just a handful of archeology spots at first but later you find something interesting

Thanks for the review Montu! I think I may end up picking it up, but I definitely see how it isn't for everyone. I like the narratives that come out the game, and if it really adds hours of content to explore then I can see myself really digging into it. I kinda hate to support higher prices for DLC with my wallet, but the sad fact is that inflation is probably gonna hit video games hard in the next couple of years. We've been lucky that gaming prices didn't change much for so long.

The dream (and you would need an apocalyptically powerful PC in the present build of the game for this to ever be possible) is that astral rifts eventually become a way for the late game to evolve into interacting with entirely new galaxies. I want a galactic custodian squaring off against a galactic emperor. Ah well, maybe by the time Stellaris 3 rolls around.

So far, I am finding the update aggravating, although it's mostly the free update rather than the paid DLC I am reacting to. Weird UI stuff. The way the leader information is laid out, it is really tough to sort out who will have what effect at the councilor, governor, and ship scientist level. The outliner, although I understand their reasons for breaking it up into parts, makes a previous weak point worse. It has always been very easy to miss that a science ship has no orders, particularly after dealing with an anomaly. Now, it is less likely to notice promptly in the outliner. Some weirdness in assigning council positions, apparently qualified leaders who don't stick. Sudden decrease in number of leader options, no apparent reason. My sense is that this needs to bake a little longer, get the kinks worked out. Honestly, I'm not sure whether it's bugs or shaky communication or a little of both.

Already have all the other dlc and I get bored mid to late game because I'm more an explorer and defender than a warmonger. Sounds like it's a hard buy for me.

I appreciate you putting your answer in the thumbnail, even if I still proceeded to watch the whole thing.

A good video to watch while waiting for the DLC to download

I only buy the DLCs when they're 50% off, so I'll wait regardless 😅 good information, I was curious what this DLC actually added

It's got a Mostly Negative rating on steam. Seems to be some sort of major problems with the DLC not even showing up/being detected by the launcher after purchase.

Theres a relic called "The Continuum"? Like the continuum transfunctioner? The device thats said to be all that stands between the universe and violent destruction? :P

I really liked the one where it just turned on the tutorial 200 years into the game

I don't buy any of the DLC unless they are 50% off, and it has been a while since one was (at least one I don't have already).

you see, I've played a couple games with this DLC. I think it's both incredible and situationally overpowered. My first game with it I played as the Human citizen federation from starship troopers. Trying to emulate this accurately, I went down the psychic route. You can only summon the dimensional fleet if your are psychic, and given how I was playing with a higher AI difficulty this one ability literally saved the entire playthrough on numerous occasions. The more you activate it, the stronger and stronger each summoned fleet gets, by the end game I was summoning fleets of 1 million strength and since they were disposable troops (leaving after 10 years) I would throw them at the front line of whatever war or crisis I was facing and usually it have a massive effect. (don't use the dimensional fleet against the Prethoryn or any other "missilemaxxers", also don't take it into combat in a pulsar system). The downside is that this fleet uses naval capacity, most of this run this wasn't an issue since I was almost constantly at war and almost never near my fleet cap. So if I was past naval cap as a result of the dimensional fleet, it was imperative to send it into the toughest battles asap. My second game with this dlc I played as a machine intelligence similar to the automatons from helldivers2. In this playthrough I got the Formless event. Through a choice option of 66% likelihood of success, it failed and I was faced with a mid game crisis version of the unbidden. I fought hard and with no thanks to the AIs in this game, I defeated them and claimed a relic known as the celestial throne, you can see it at 4:30 in the lower left. This is probably the most powerful relic in the game IMO, because this relic's active effect is to boost your monthly astral thread production by 333% effectively tripling it. Now, remember those astral thread edicts that are mentioned? one of those is called "astral binding", it boosts all your production of everything by 10% after other modifiers no questions asked. However astral binding is way too expensive to run all the time normally, but by spamming the throne relic, you can :) So if you've read all this, start THREADMAXXING

Another Montu Plays video? It feels like you've been releasing content nearly every other day! Truly we are blessed to have Montu as our benevolent lizard overlord.

I would buy it immediately for 10€, but 20€ is a bit much for so little content. It also hasn't been on sale so far, so I will continue to wait.

I was very tempted to buy it instantly but after seeing it rated on Steam as mostly negative, I decided I wait on -50%.

I already have all the other dlcs I want so I'll be getting this soon. Thanks for the review!

Should take into account that it makes MP really unstable aswell. As soon as our mp lobby started using astral planes, desyncs and crashes have skyrocketed, and when we turned it off, the desyncs and crashes stopped (we were playing pure vanilla aswell btw. mods weren't the issue).

The intro is genius

And the quality goes down at paradox with every release and finally reached these stars, too.

I’d love to wait, but I tried that with First Contact and Galactic Paragons and the sale never came even 7-8 months later. Although with Christmas approaching it might be different.

Dark Consortium is definetly somwthing appealing for crisis empires. I don't have any other civics currently in mind but I imagine also going fanatic spiritualist for more unity to unlock become the crisis faster. PS: But you need citadels and collosal assembly yards anyway so 🤷

Another reason to wait: many people who have bought the DLC (though steam) find that the game is random about if it will recognize that you have the DLC or not. Combine that with crashes that randomly kick you out of the game and you have a cycle of pain where you can't resume a game because it no longer thinks you have the DLC... For a company that plans to profit on DLCs, they should at least make 100% sure the people who buy the DLC can play it as intended.

Wish the DLC's would come with more pre made empires...

I bought it, it's 20% off on certain stores. I am a Stellaris DLC collector ^^

got it, so Montu finishes the leader trait tier list first and new relic video

This dlc story pack was outsourced right, what is your opinion about how paradox will handle future dlc this way plz ?

I just wish we'd get more graphics, like we could actually see inside the rifts. Just having a tiny jpeg in menu of text feels very boring to me

If you're picky you might not want to grab it but it gave us a lot of what I wanted and I have gotten lucky with bugs being minimal

20€ for an ape portrait and some new shenaningans.

As someone who already owns all the other dlc I don’t regret buying it for 20 at all. Every run I’ve done since it came out has been dimensional worshipers and it makes it to where instead of rift exploring being mid to late game it becomes one of the first things you can do. It becomes super overpowered when you’re getting all these advantages so early on

Dunno man, all I saw was that one could block wormholes in your thumbnail and was hooked just at that. That said, I always wait for a good sell for pretty much any dlc

I will say part of it for me was steam had it 10% off and the last two dlc haven't gone on sale at all yet. Haven't had a chance to play it yet but mid to late game exploring is very welcome if it works right. Still feel like that is the weakest point in game.

Solid take. I have all the other DLCs and am obviously eager for more narrative content, but I really haven't explored the game to the extent that I urgently need more, so I'll probably wait for a sale. I'll tell you one thing, though: trying to accumulate 50k dark matter at +30/month (to win as the crisis) while fending off every fleet in the galaxy is making me borderline suicidal, so if anything I'm tempted to spend 20€ just on that dark matter civic.

Montu: Should you buy astral planes dlc Me(who has already bought it): Interesting video wonder if I should buy it XD

Ima be real with you. There is very little Stellaris can do to not have me buy there DLC’s

stellaris barely changes the actual things I want it to improve for ages, they just chasing dlc for dlc's sake

Great review. Thank you.

"Should you buy [Insert Stellaris DLC]?" PARADOX GAMERS: "They already have my wallet."

If this was $10 I would have snatched it up day one but alas this is another expensive dlc in the strategy genre.

I plan on getting it around Black Friday when the price should hopefully be cut in half

I want to play. And I own it. But it’s broken and a lot of other players are facing the same issue 😢

Thanks montuwu, you're a gentleman and a saint

This is the buggiest patch PDX has released, by far. Many leader bonuses don't work, many ascention perk bonuses don't work, there are big balance problems with the 3.10.0 patch, and many users complain about frequent crashes. IMO, this is all due to Paradox outsourcing the work to low-cost bidders (or the low-cost bidders outsourcing!). The game will be unplayable for at least a week.

Well, wanting to take advantage of the preorder discount, I already bought it. Now, I'm just waiting for mods to be updated. I've been with this game since 2016 so, I already have all of the dlcs.

If I'm paying $25 for a glorified choose your own adventure DLC then it better has more content than the entire published Silmarillion and LoTR combined.

20 bucks for basically a story pack is kind of sad.

Thanks for the review!

Me watching the "should you buy it" video while waiting for my payment to be processed *gigachad music*

Astral Planes playthrough felt like, well... Physics researches are OP. You have like x1.5 or maybe even x2 physics research rate than sociology and engineering. Especially with the science building you can unlock using astral threads. Energy weapons, which are no-brainer for low-difficulty PvE, are now *yay* even more powerful cause you can get them too early. Combined with First Contact 50%-next-tier-laser events you can get T5 lasers VERY EARLY and since you don't have to spend science to unlock them, feel free to research a new reactor so you can fit your new lasers into your ships. Feels weird tbh. Definitely need something similar for engineering and sociology just to feel that all science branches are equal. Well, maybe there's some mechanics increasing sociology like observation stations, rangers civic, swarm genocide bonuses, whatever, but engineering feels off.

The watchers and now there is the formless and the abberath and so on

My money vanished into the black hole that is Paradox long before this video came out.

I preordered for 15 or so off an alternative storefront. ITAD is a godsend. With inflation lately that's not much of a difference in my financial situation, but I understand some people feeling some reluctance to just accept a fairly large all at once jump in the pricing standard. I fully expect the next "real" expansion to be 30 now. New normal. Games have always had a stronger pricing inertia than most consumer goods (they sat at 40 for a decade or so, then 50, 60, etc rather than going up a buck or two every other year), so when the adjustments do come they're felt more.

it also has a problem of authenticating the DLC a real pain in the rear a suppose work around is to go and verify game files sometimes it works and sometimes it don't.

I mean the devs even understood the price would be the main sticking point which is why it's 10% off through the 27th. So $18 instead of $20. I still think that's $5-7 overpriced, but I still picked it up because I've been playing since launch in 2016, have all the other DLC, and spend way too much of my free time genoci- I mean subjuga- I mean exploring the Galaxy.

I feel like a lot of the dlc have gone downhill. Nothing has come close to utopia, apocalypse, federations, megacorp, or even synthetic dawn in a while. Lack of new megastructures, empire types, crisis factions, ascension paths and perks, and really just play styles has been disappointing to see. The only major positive has been story driven origins, as they have consistently gotten better, but aren’t typically very replayable

I haven't played Stellaris in a long while, but from what I heard in this video, the dlc sounds like a repackaged mod that costs one third of the original game. Considering that PDX did this with the latest EU4 dlc, they've been making a lot of weird choices lately.

IDC, I'm buying it for the tall civic anyway lmao

Twenty dollars, they can keep it. I will wait a year for it to be on sale. Like the last story pack they have raised the price beyond reason.

"Rift that like button"? That's quite the reach there...

For some reason my game doesn't enable the DLC half the time, anyone else getting this problem?

I stopped buying thing on release a long time ago. Honestly, there are dusins of mods out there that are vastly better than most DLCs - for every game I've delved 1000+ hours into. It's hard for me to justify 30€ for a few new shiny things, or even 10-15€ for BS cosmetic DLCs.

I think the next big expansion should focus on the exiting FE and original crisis's making them more of a threat and expanding their features, maybe having something more unique to them like an unique planet that's an entirely a forge world that was used to mass produced titans or a planet so large that it collapsed into a sun or black hole but granted them the ability to do that to other planets, idk these are just ideas I'm firing off but I think they need to take bigger risks with stellaris. Oh and catch console up please and thank you

I hate how accurate that beginning is.

I'm a new player but I thought it was worth the price of admission. One expansion of Stellaris for the price of taking two people to the movies? Sure why not.

A launch so broken, people who didn't buy it also can't play Stellaris.

TLDR: $20 dollar dlc with $8 dollars of content. I suspect Paradox is subscribing to the profit models of larger companies like Blizzard by producing less for more capitalizing on a strong fanbase. Edit: I enjoy it sure, but with a sense of loss and regret. I bought it and have been testing stuff for about 20 hours now. It really doesn't interface with other dlc's in any special manner, the dark consortium literally skips some major game progression, and the lack of actual narrative is the real red flag. I have never seen Paradox slack on narrative before to this extent, the origin is really a bundle of non-unique mechanics, especially compared to the stories we received with other dlc. I have to be honest, the quality of Paradox is dropping while the prices are increasing. Shrinkflation at this point appears to be the future of Paradox. I would price this amount of dlc and effort at $8 USD tops.

Bro that opening played me like a fucking fiddle 😭

Honestly I just got it to play tall on a birch world ngl. Worth the money? Prolly not. Looking forward to the narrative bits though.

Yay 3.10 messed my UI mod.

New challange: drink a shor of vodka whenever you hear the sords « astral » and « rift »

I wish it had more portraits to justify the price

Looks like a sale sort of DLC.

Thing is, even if Paradox is rising prices of DLC, like everyone else is doing, they are at least delivering in quality, and well, they have the custodian team. With the recent debacle with CA and total war, I really can't find any reason to complain about PDX.

So Montee, any opinion on the Formless?

Love it, but I am still waiting for them to fix the late game fleet lag, even an option to have one model for each ship type represent in a fleet so our games aren’t a crawl. Great video as always Montu!

Its more like a Story Pack then... First DLC I did not buy day one then...

I uninstalled Stellaris today. After years of great new content they have dropped the ball. There are now much more bugs than features in the game and it has become a bloated mess. The final kicker for me was experiencing all of the same bugs that have existed for years now, after I bought 3.10 and updated to 3.10.1. The devs have cleaely given up. So will I.

To late

i finally played stellaris for the first time the other day and played for 16 hours straight from beginning to crisis end... i may be one of those laughing people XD

Not gonna lie, as soon as I saw it I didn't even look at what it was, just bought it >.

I honestly feel like they mainly added this entire thing to see what modders will likely do with it as well. As cool as this is, some of it feels rather barebones.

Yeah I think it’s mixed. Good dlc but encourages this kinda pricing moving forward :p

One portrait species... Jaysus how lazy is that?!

Ive been pouring over the patch notes but havent found it anywhere. Did they change the starbase defense platform count?